Compare / Weaviate
WarpSearch vs Weaviate Cloud
Managed vector database with BM25 and hybrid search built in. Billed by vector dimensions stored, storage and backups, with a $45 monthly minimum on Flex. Queries are not billed.
Looking for a Weaviate alternative, or working out Weaviate pricing for a real workload? Weaviate Cloud bills by vector dimensions stored, storage and backups, from $45 a month, and has BM25 and hybrid search built in. Below are its costs line by line next to WarpSearch, which bills $2 per million requests and answers the Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr APIs.
The scoreboard
Price
Cheaper on 1 workload
Monthly, list prices. Bars are drawn to the middle of a range.
How they bill
| WarpSearch | Weaviate | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Flat $2 per million requests | Vector dimensions stored (x3 replicas on HA clusters), from $0.00465 per million; queries not billed |
| Storage | $0.08 per GB-month, lower at volume | From $0.12 per GiB, plus backups from $0.03036 per GiB |
| Writes | $1.00 per GB | Not billed directly; new objects add dimensions and storage |
| Minimum | $10 a month | $45 a month (Flex) |
| Keyword search | BM25 with Elasticsearch query syntax | BM25 and hybrid search built in |
| Aggregations and facets | Yes, including date histograms | Basic: count, sum, min, max, top occurrences, group by one property |
| API | Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr compatible | Own API (GraphQL, REST, gRPC) |
What Weaviate cannot do, or does only in part: Own API (GraphQL, REST and gRPC), not Elasticsearch compatible. Aggregations are basic: count, sum, min, max, top occurrences and group by one property, with no date histograms or nested buckets. Price follows vector dimensions stored, times 3 replicas on HA clusters.
Price
Monthly cost at list prices in US East.
1M text chunks with 768-dim embeddings, 7 GB of JSON. 1M queries a month spread through the day. 1 GB written a month.
| WarpSearch | Weaviate | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.56 (7 GB held x $0.08) | $7 at list rate; $16 to $17 in the calculator |
| Writes | $1.00 (1 GB x $1.00) | $0 (not billed) |
| Search | $2.00 (1M requests) | $0 (queries not billed); vector dimensions $11 at list rate, $90 to $117 in the calculator |
| Data returned | $0 (about 40 GB, inside the free 100 GB) | $0 (free for a promotional period) |
| Minimum | $10 minimum applies (usage is $3.56) | $45, applies at list rates |
| Total a month | $10 | $48 to $143 |
Estimate. Low end: $45 minimum plus about $3 of backups at listed rates. High end: Weaviate pricing calculator, Flex, HFresh or HNSW RQ-8, backups included. The table and the calculator disagree; see caveat.
Performance
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Keyword search, 2.8M docs (LoTTE) | 2.1 ms median, 3,700 queries/s |
| Keyword search, 10M passages (MS MARCO v2) | 2.4 ms median (5.4 ms with an exact total hit count) |
| Keyword search, small BEIR sets | 1 to 6 ms median |
| Vector search, 10M x 128-dim (BigANN SIFT) | 0.964 recall@10 at 6.2 ms median, 162 queries/s |
| Vector search, 1M x 1536-dim (arXiv) | 0.961 recall@10 at 15.7 ms median |
| Filtered vector search, 10M (YFCC) | 0.959 recall@10 at 10.4 ms median |
| Log filters, 22M events (http_logs) | 1 to 2 ms median |
| Log aggregations, 22M events | 190 to 430 ms median (sort, daily histogram, avg by status) |
| Ingest, short text | 63,000 to 97,000 docs/s |
| Ingest, logs (247M events) | 76,000 to 81,000 events/s |
| Ingest, 768 to 1536-dim vectors | 2,200 to 4,000 vectors/s |
| Time to searchable | Seconds, or immediate with commit=true |
| Cold start | Not measured yet. First query on a 2.3 GB index: 17 to 19 ms vs 2.7 ms warm (page cache only) |
Measured October 2026 through our Elasticsearch-compatible API, warm cache, client in the same region, single runs. Every test ran on deliberately minimal hardware, 2 to 4 CPUs (a 4 CPU container or an AWS i8g.large with 2 vCPUs), so these are the least favorable results we can produce. More hardware only improves them. Numbers exclude internet round trips.
Bottom line
Choose WarpSearch for
- Small RAG: $10 vs about $48 to $143 a month on Weaviate Flex.
- Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr compatibility: keep your clients and queries.
- Facets, date histograms and log analytics in the same engine. Weaviate aggregations stop at simple counts and group by one property.
- Storage at $0.08 per GB-month vs from $0.12 per GiB, with no 3x replica multiplier on the bill.
For a small RAG app WarpSearch is about 5x to 14x cheaper than Weaviate Flex. Both do BM25, vector and hybrid search; WarpSearch adds Elasticsearch compatibility and log-grade aggregations.
Questions
How much does Weaviate cost?
Weaviate Cloud has a Free plan, Flex from $45 a month, and Premium through sales (its FAQ says from $400 a month). Flex lists vector dimensions from $0.00465 per million, storage from $0.12 per GiB and backups from $0.03036 per GiB. A small RAG app (1M chunks, 768-dim) comes to about $48 to $143 a month, depending on whether you use the listed rates or the pricing calculator.
Is Weaviate free to use?
The open-source database is free to self-host. Weaviate Cloud has a Free plan with 100,000 objects, 1 GB memory, 10 GB disk and 1 collection, without high availability. Paid clusters start at $45 a month on Flex. WarpSearch is free up to 1 GB of indexed data in 1 collection, then $10 a month minimum.
How is Weaviate Cloud billed?
By vector dimensions: objects times dimensions per vector, times the replication factor. Paid shared clusters are highly available, so the calculator counts 3 replicas. Storage and backups are billed per GiB, and compression lowers the per-dimension rate. Queries and writes are not billed directly.
Weaviate vs Pinecone: which costs less?
On a small RAG app Weaviate Flex is about $48 to $143 a month and Pinecone $118 to $137. On the 5M-product catalog at 50M queries a month, Weaviate is about $51 to $339 because queries are not billed, while Pinecone on demand is $8,100 to $9,200. WarpSearch is $10 and $139.
Does Weaviate support keyword and hybrid search?
Yes. Weaviate has BM25 keyword search and hybrid search, which fuses BM25 and vector scores, built in on every plan. WarpSearch also does BM25, vector and hybrid search, and adds faceted aggregations and date histograms with Elasticsearch-compatible queries.
Sources
- Weaviate pricing
- Weaviate pricing (Markdown version)
- Weaviate Cloud pricing update
- ANN benchmarks
- Aggregate API
- Hybrid search
- WarpSearch pricing
Weaviate's rate table and its own pricing calculator disagree. The table lists vector dimensions from $0.00465 per million with no time unit; the calculator code works out to about $0.04 per million per replica-month for the cheapest profile, before a 1.2x Flex factor. Our low end uses the table, the high end the calculator. Data transfer is free for a promotional period only. Prices checked October 20, 2026. List prices in US dollars, before discounts. Estimates are marked. Tell us if something is out of date: contact us.